The News: Zoho Corporation, a global, privately held company that offers the most comprehensive suite of business software applications in the industry, today announced the release of Catalyst, the company’s visionary full-stack serverless platform for developers. Catalyst is a simple to use yet extremely powerful offering that allows developers to create and run microservices and applications. Catalyst gives developers access to the same underlying services and frameworks that power Zoho’s 45+ applications used by more than 45 million users around the world. Read the full press release on Business Wire.
Analyst Take: Zoho is quickly becoming a company that business application providers cannot ignore.
Do you know Zoho?
Zoho is outspoken about its large application ecosystem that includes 45+ apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back office operations. The company also has an array of productivity and collaboration tools. While there are certainly applications that seem to be driving the company’s growth like CRM and Service Desk, it seems as if the company is trying to become a one stop shop for cloud business applications; a bit “Salesforce(ish)” of the early days.
The Catalyst Announcement
Catalyst is a business application platform that allows specific vertical applications to be quickly developed, tested, deployed, and supported, without having to worry about global standards, infrastructure, and support
Essentially the company is rolling out a PaaS for its developers. This is important and becoming business as usual in the software space.
Zoho touts itself as a bit easier to use than its competitors so it will be interesting to see what type of response customers have for the platform AND if this new platform is the “Catalyst” for winning new business.
For more on the specific functions and tools, refer to the link above in the release from Zoho.
Overall Impressions of Zoho and Catalyst
The key to serverless is that companies are able to modify on the fly without interruption to the operation of software.
As Zoho is clearly in a growth mode, the company is apparently taking note of the disparate needs that its clients have and the Catalyst platform is a vehicle to help its users to develop nuance into their Zoho instances that are specific to their business while not impacting application performance.
I’ll finish as I started. Zoho is an interesting company to watch. Its user growth is impressive and the company has quietly found itself in a unique position to disrupt its competitors and win business from companies looking for a simpler, faster and perhaps lower cost alternative to many of the monolithic tools in the market today.
Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.
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Image: Zoho
The original version of this article was first published on Futurum Research.
Daniel Newman is the Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and the CEO of Broadsuite Media Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise. From Big Data to IoT to Cloud Computing, Newman makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology projects, which leads to his ideas regularly being cited in CIO.Com, CIO Review and hundreds of other sites across the world. A 5x Best Selling Author including his most recent “Building Dragons: Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy,” Daniel is also a Forbes, Entrepreneur and Huffington Post Contributor. MBA and Graduate Adjunct Professor, Daniel Newman is a Chicago Native and his speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.